BEEFCAKE BALLET FROM BRUSSELS : BEJART RETROSPECTIVE HONORS THE VULGAR

Some choreographers lapse, from time to unhappy time, into vulgarity. Others just flirt with it. Maurice Bejart--whose Ballet of the 20th Century returned to Royce Hall, UCLA, Tuesday night after a nine-year absence--doesn’t just lapse or flirt. He celebrates vulgarity.

That’s just the beginning. He also exults in it, luxuriates in it, wallows in it.

Vulgarity for Bejart, of course, is no vice. It is a way of life. He lives it with a passion so vehement, so selective and so flamboyant that one has to applaud the breadth and depth of his commitment.

Commitment, alas, cannot be equated with illumination. Bejart deals in good balletic grammar, to be sure, but he avoids good taste as if it were a dying, decaying, contaminated swan. His company from Brussels, which introduced a sampler Tuesday night spanning 24 years of Bejartiana and bearing the catch-all label “Eros Thanatos,” is composed of 28 underused but pretty girls and 30 overworked but even prettier boys. It is a superbly trained, classically oriented company that specializes in exotic pretension, spiritual subterfuge and stylized sexual athleticism.

The dancers are sufficiently virtuosic and versatile to grope and collapse and twitch and heave and stretch and bump and grind and preen and strut and simulate mating in any number of terpsichorean combinations, permutations and accents.

The accents, it should be noted, range from neo-Fokine to neo-Graham to neo “Cage aux Folles,” with the inevitable stress on bare-chested beefcake ballerinos. Luckily, they are good beefcake ballerinos.

Bejart can be relied upon to concoct compelling dance numbers for audiences that don’t really know or like “Giselle” or “Jewels.” He prefers to invoke more universal inspirations: the Kabuki theater, Vegas glitzerie, Follies Bergeres profundity, Minskyesque burlesque in reverse drag, the Apache S&M; syndrome, Indian mysticism, Folklorico Esperanto, the Ballets quasi-Russes, an intellectual Tropicana and a tragic Trockadero. . . .

Let no one say the man lacks resources. Or guts. Or the ability to please the masses instantly.

What he does seem to lack, unfortunately, is aesthetic and musical discrimation. Such seemed the painful case, at least, with his dancing catalogue of love and death in 17 torrid installments.

The vaudeville show began with the final climactic snippet--anticlimactic out of context-- of “Le Sacre du Printemps,” which Bejart reduced in 1959 to a pre-Plato’s Retreat encounter ritual. The central figures, basking in simulated nudity as well as simulated passion, were Shonach Mirk and Patrice Touron.

With dancers from one item on the agenda overlapping into the next and with a few leitmotivic gentlemen stalking the boards at incongruous moments, Bejart tries to impose a unifying link on the distinctly disparate proceedings. It doesn’t work in terms of cohesion, but the resulting contrasts are sometimes amusing.

After Stravinsky comes Bach, a restrained pas de deux for Grazia Galante and Ronald Perry that combines Baroque music with neo-classical dancing with spicy acrobatic nuances. Before anyone can sigh at the sweetness of it all, the stage is usurped by the macho corps bearing sticks for a pseudo-Indonesian war dance called “Illuminations.” This gives way, and not a moment too soon, to a pagan number, “Heliogabalus,” which pretends to represent Africa as the participants crawl on all fours, give each other piggy-back rides and fuse to imitate animals.

Before anyone can say bingo-bango-bongo, the infernal tape recorder blasts some Indian vocal music at us to accompany a symmetrical dance of love and death for two suave gentlemen: Gil Roman (white skin, black pants) and Ronald Perry (black skin, white pants).

This, of course, gives way to some tongue-in-cheeky mod-rock gyrations for seven girls and four boys. And that leads us to a gentle Mahler lied sung via bullhorns, I think, by Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau, and danced by Yann le Gac with Kyra Kharkevitch wrapped around him.

Now it is time for macho brio: a strutting, shouting, running, reaching, stomping ensemble in which the fellows with red handkerchiefs celebrate Belgium’s independence day to the rousing rinky-dink strains of Meyerbeer. Nonstop, this gives way to a victory dance with shadow boxing for Michel Gascard and friends, which appropriates a chorus from Verdi’s “Ernani.” (Another operatic item, this one utilizing dancing madonnas and Callas’ “Casta Diva,” was omitted, perhaps mercifully.)

Perfumed comedy prances across the stage as Patrice Touron, in billowing skirts and gossamer wings, smirks through a less-than-loving Pavlova imitation. He is wafted, not incidentally, by Kreisler’s “Dragonfly.” Just in case we couldn’t tell that the charade wasn’t all that funny and that the protagonist wasn’t all that feminine, Touron strips down to bare essentials at the end and rushes off in what may be anger but also could be petulance.

This clears the stage for the Act I finale, and for Jorge Donn, the senior primo ballerino who had crossed the stage previously at odd intervals reading a newspaper and sporting a black suit and black hat. Suddenly alone, he rips off his coat and shirt in order to dance with, on and around a black chair. Bejart simply adores chairs.

The dance--faintly grotesque, intriguingly ambiguous, undeniably dramatic and eminently strenuous--allows the hero to fight both inner demons and the once sublime Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth. The demons win. Mahler loses.

The muscular mishmash continues after intermission with some tights-and-tippytoe Beethoven and some folksy Italianita in which the assembled girls applaud the solo boy while a cheap Neapolitan ditty twangs over the too-loud loudspeakers.

This gives way to a “Romeo and Juliet” potpourri in which a noble Ronald Perry supports Shonach Mirk in an exhaustive exploration of the possibilities of the split in excelsis. While the ungainly open-leg exercises are carried on in the foreground, five modern Sharks and five modern Jets in jeans first battle, then couple off to die in blissful orgasmic embrace. The music is Berlioz’s.

The superversatile and long-suffering Patrice Touron returns for the tour de force of “The Life and Death of a Human Marionette,” a manipulated striptease marathon in the ancient Japanese ceremonial manner. In “The Birds,” the penultimate stylistic zigzag, Marco Berriel dons white tights to slink in nightclubby Hadjidakis ecstasy while a chorus of women in black surround him marking time with their bellies.

Finally comes the piece de resistance everyone--well almost everyone--has been waiting for: “Bolero.” Now in his late 30s and a bit puffy in the middle, Jorge Donn may not be a perfect 10 any more. But, he still commands a lot of charisma, not to mention stamina and control. Atop his red table, he can still wiggle and gyrate and contort a stormy crescendo of sexual innuendo that slowly but inevitably inflames the boys who surround him in an onanistic circle.

Bejart, not incidentally, has created three versions of his deafening and deadening Ravel orgy. The original has a woman teasing the men (Marcia Haydee usurps Donn’s table tonight and Saturday at UCLA). A second edition, now significantly abandoned, has a man teasing a chorus of arousable women. But it is the all-male “Bolero” that seems to make most balletic hearts beat fastest.

The erotic endurance contest certainly made a lot of hearts beat fast at Royce Hall Tuesday. There must be something wrong with mine. Gosh.